Bye, bye Eclipse, hello Vim!

Today I did something I wanted to do for a long time: to throw away Eclipse. I’ve been using Eclipse for PHP development for some time now, and it always didn’t really feel good. It was a constant pain in the ass. And a fewtimes, it really seemed to fail to do what it should do: work!

The irritation always started right away: if you want to use Eclipse, it first has a load screen, that needs about 20 seconds to load your workspace. But then it isn’t over yet. It still needs to process all your projects before you can actually start using it. Ok, you could do some work while it was loading your projects, but it was awfully slow during that times.

After a while, when it was loaded, you could start programming. Great, but there were some general annoyances. First of all, autocompletion, I loved the feature. But the problem was, that when I typed a bit of text, and hit <Ctrl>-Space, it took a while before Eclipse brought up the autocompletion. Another very annoying thing, is that it sometimes had random slowdowns. You would type some stuff, and then you had to wait 30 seconds, and then you slowly saw your text being printed to the screen, character by character. In the meanwhile, I already saved the file and switched to Firefox to test my changes. Obviously, the changes didn’t work, because eclipse didn’t quite manage to save the file yet.

So, a while ago, somebody said that the PHP plugin for NetBeans was a lot better. So I tried NetBeans. But after a ‘sudo apt-get install netbeans’, there was one obvious (and bad) problem: my font settings weren’t used in NetBeans! It seemed like that is a general problem with Java when you’re running Compiz. But I wasn’t throwing away Compiz in favor of NetBeans. Also, Eclipse is Java too, so in my opinion, NetBeans probably could do the same thing.

So today, I finally decided to go with vim. Eclipse was just being too slow again. I made the decision that I won’t touch Eclipse for one month, and that I will use vim as replacement during that time. Lets hope I don’t come back crying to Eclipse. Though I don’t really think that will happen (vim really has some great features, and can do (almost) anything that Eclipse can). Also, I used matthew’s blog for a nice start to PHP programming with vim, and I hope I can keep going to use vim for this month .

10 comments

I think you will definitely come to Netbeans or Eclipse again . Not sure though .
Why I feel so is , for some of the great features like code auto completion . Not sure whether auto completion is there .
Let me know if vim is having all the same features like eclipse through command line . I love to hear if so and will switch to vim as you have done .

The compiz-java problem is indeed a pain in the ass, but I’ve dropped compiz for the reason of not being interested in the graphical effects and the slowing down of general desktop usage and the java problem.

Netbeans is a great tool IMHO, but not because of it’s speed. I use it mainly because I can’t imagine working with vim/cli editor at multiple files the same time. The ease and ordering files in tabs/sections is what keeps me with an IDE. Is vim solving this problem?

I have used vim for nearly 10 years now and never looked back. Curious to know how you’re getting on too.

Also Adrian, as far as multiple files go you have split to split the screen and load different files into each, also the screen utility in linux means you can open a number of files in vim and tab (well, ctrl+a+n or ctrl+a+p) through them. Never had any problem with multiple files and vims key codes are just brilliant, no mouse required, its well worth learning how to use it.